Shapevent

When flash 8 first came out I spent a week or two playing with BitmapData and writing some AS1 style libraries… doing things like photoshop style polar coordinates filters, brightness/contrast and distortable vector shapes that I would use as brushes. Finally got around to re-uploading these after changing servers… so here they are:

Click any of the below images to view the entire texture archive

Taking a bitmap, transforming it in some way and copying it back to itself can sometimes produce things that look like video feedback - coupled with blendmodes you can get some unexpected and interesting effects.

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One of my many favorite equations is the conversion from polar coordinates to cartesian... in actionscript it looks like this:

I was teaching the ins and outs of polar coordinates to my students yesterday and thought of a good assignment for them... "Use Graphics or BitmapData to create an interactive sketch involving the polar to cartesian conversion." Now, when I first encounted this equation, I didn't really know what it was or why it worked... I used it for circular motion in Director... I also tried randomly tweaking it to see what kind of results I could get.... things like this:

I advocate this kind of random experimentation when I teach game design or talk to students interested in generative visuals. Playing with the numbers just improves understanding... even if you don't know what your playing with at first...

When I got home yesterday I created this small sketch:

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